What happened to me?

My path to Gentle Rewilding

The path to this work wasn’t linear. It was a trail stitched together through hard work, a lot of solitude, the inspiration of nature and a stubborn hope.

For over two decades, I’ve been listening to women tell their stories, across cultures, across careers, across crises. I worked as a researcher, a mentor, a corporate leader, a mother, a friend. And what I noticed again and again was this:

So many women are incredibly strong.
And so many are quietly exhausted from holding everything together.
And very few are given the time or tools to ask: What do I want next?

My own story winds through divorce and trauma; single motherhood, heartbreak, house floods, someone crashing into my beloved van, redundancy and supporting my son who decided against following a conventional education. Throughout I’ve had to radically accept the unacceptable with grace and positivity and a proactive approach to addressing things so that the future wasn’t dictated by disaster!

My time at Parsons School of Design changed everything for me. I discovered strategic design and futures thinking, and it felt like finding a compass I didn’t know I’d lost.

These tools helped me name what I wanted, what I believed, and what I was ready to leave behind. I wrote a book about how futures thinking could be a powerful tool for female agency and liberation....and then….almost like a Shakespearian play, I got laid off. Expectedly but sort of unexpectedly. I found myself in the position of the women for whom I wrote my book. It was time to practice what I had been quietly preaching.

That’s how Gentle Rewilding was born.